Idiotic regime media interview totally crazy man because his rants flatter their geopolitical preconceptions, have awkward moment as he turns out to be a convicted felon & would-be Trump assassin

Last Sunday, a totally crazy man named Ryan Wesley Routh hid in the bushes outside the fence of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach with a rifle, apparently waiting to ambush Donald Trump while he played a game of golf. Secret Service agents, who had failed to secure the perimeter of the golf course, noticed Routh’s rifle protruding from the shrubbery and shot at him. Routh fled, but was later arrested. Here is looking like a lunatic in the back of a police car:

Routh has been a convicted felon since 2002, after he barricaded himself in a building with an automatic weapon. He’s also collected criminal charges for possession of stolen goods, possession of a stolen motor vehicle and various driving offences – all while working as a builder and alienating a wide variety of people along the way:

Saili Levi, the owner of a vanilla farm [in Hawaii], hired Mr. Routh to build what Mr. Levi called a small “shop on wheels” so he could more easily haul his products to farmer’s markets. Mr. Levi found Mr. Routh to be a “scattered” man who seemed unable to accept responsibility.

Mr. Levi said that Mr. Routh’s work was shoddy, and that after the two had verbally sparred about it Mr. Levi received an email full of cutting insults and references to Mr. Routh’s involvement in international conflicts.

“I spent 5 months in Ukraine last year,” Mr. Routh wrote, “and 3 months there this year, and 2 weeks in DC and 2 weeks in Taiwan this year volunteering and trying to supply thousands of Afghan soldiers to help win the war.”

“Perhaps I would be happier dead on the front lines than dealing with rich people in fancy cars as I drive old broken down vehicles and hoping to keep my account out of the negative and hoping for food to eat,” he added. “China and Russia will certainly win at this rate.”

As we would expect from a crazy person, Routh’s political allegiances show no clear pattern. He claims to have supported Trump in 2016, but he didn’t vote in that election. Later he turned on Trump and used his Twitter account to express support for Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, to deride Biden as“sleepy Joe,” and to advocate for Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy in the 2024 Republican primary. All the while he appears to have made various small donations to Democratic organisations.

The war in Ukraine pushed Routh over the edge. He flew to Kiev with ambitions of fighting the Russians, but because he was in his mid-fifties and mentally unstable, the International Legion turned him down. He responded by styling himself as a military recruiter working to fly under-occupied Afghans to Europe to defend Ukrainian democracy. Of course, he did not recruit anybody. What he did do, was set up a creepy protest tent at Independence Square in Kiev, which he called the “International Volunteer Center” …

… tie this sign to the sandbagged statue of Princess Olha in St. Michael’s Square …

… and photograph himself wearing the leavings of another protest stand after the Kiev police made him dismantle it:

Eventually Routh left Ukraine and self-published a 291-page book that you can buy for $2.99 on Amazon. It is called Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen – Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the End of Humanity, and is the source of the photos I’ve pasted above. I couldn’t get past the introduction, where Routh claims that the Ukraine conflict “will determine who we are as a species” and that it is the “focal point of the indictment of our entire human race.” He also says that he “failed humanity and wasted 5 months” in Ukraine “with no measurable success,” among other things because he let “communism beat [him] down.”

The amazing thing, is that while Routh was bouncing around Ukraine, behaving like a deranged homeless person and being beaten down by communism, the press promoted him as an important figure in the war effort.

On 16 June 2022, Newsweek Romania published an extensive interview with Routh, whom they billed as “an American who is recruiting volunteers for the International Legion.” The magazine printed his tangled, repetitive ramblings uncritically and apparently unedited. He raved that the Ukraine war represented “a struggle between good and evil,” said that “everyone on the planet should … support Ukraine and its military,” and lamented that only “a tiny fraction of the, let’s say, 5 billion people in the world” are fighting in Ukraine. He spoke at length about how everybody everywhere needs to go to Kiev, if only just to show their support, because millions of civilians milling around for no reason is precisely what any country fighting a fierce defensive war needs:

We should have millions of people from all over the world coming to Independence Square in Kiev. I don’t understand why we don’t have these people here. I am here every day … We have some people coming, but only a few. I am amazed that I am standing here without these thousands of people to join me. We need volunteers from anywhere, from any country in Asia, from Africa, from Australia, Canada, South America, Europe, anywhere. We need everybody here. Even if you have no special training, just come here. We need not only fighters, but we need supporters to come here and say “I support Ukrainians, I defend human rights, I promote kindness, generosity, altruism.” We have to show the world that we care. It’s essential. Even if you’re not involved , just being here and supporting shows that we care about our fellow human beings. It’s the most important thing we can do.

He also provided an extended excursus on the importance of five-dollar donations to fund bullet-proof vests:

When I call home in the United States and say “hey, I need five dollars from you to go towards buying a bullet-proof vest for Ukrainians” but get no response I’m no longer sure the world is as wonderful as I once thought it was. I thought everyone would respond very generously. You don’t have to come here, but if I ask you to donate five dollars to purchase a bullet-proof vest to save a Ukrainian’s life and you don’t, it only increases my disappointment in humanity.

On 25 March 2023, Routh was interviewed by no less a publication than the New York Times, which reported on his nonexistent scheme to recruit Afghans for Ukraine. Of course Afghans can’t travel to Europe or most other countries, but no matter: “We can probably purchase passports through Pakistan, since it’s such a corrupt country,” our crazy convicted felon told America’s paper of record, whose reporters proved more than happy to print his words.

Behind the scenes, Routh was busy harassing a woman named Evelyn Aschenbrenner, who was at the time an actual volunteer for Ukraine’s International Legion. Aschenbrenner “identif[ies] as bisexual and genderfluid and use[s] the pronouns they/them,” and she also spent last year wondering how she might “put on a drag king show for Ukraine’s military.” Even in this total (strangely transsexual) clown car, Routh was unwelcome. He tried to sell Aschenbrenner on his Afghan recruitment scheme, and grew bitter when she voiced scepticism:

The world is full of mentally unstable, frustrated and angry people. For the most part they are ignored. Routh, however, supported the Cause of the Moment, and so his anger was different. It generated an entire article by Tanya Lukyanova in Semafor, which screamed that “Ukraine is turning down hundreds of Afghan soldiers who want to join its war effort.”

Hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S.-trained Afghan fighters are seeking to join Ukraine’s foreign legion, according to a key Ukrainian recruiter, applications submitted by Afghans, and an interview with two of those fighters.

But for reasons that cast a light both on Ukraine’s military strategy and its global relationships, the fighters have so far been turned away even as Russia increasingly relies on irregular forces such as foreign soldiers, including ones from Afghanistan …

“Most of the Ukrainian authorities do not want these soldiers,” said Ryan Routh, head of the International Volunteer Center in Ukraine, a private organization which helps foreigners seeking to assist the war effort connect with military units and aid groups. “I have had partners meeting with [Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense] every week and still have not been able to get them to agree to issue one single visa.”

For those who don’t want to scroll up, I remind you that this is what the Routh-headed “International Volunteer Center in Ukraine” looks like:

Yesterday, a sheepish Lukyanova returned to print, asking “Why Did Journalists Like Me Take Ryan Routh Seriously?” Aside from casting aspersions on our “degraded … discourse,” Lukyanova does not have any answer to this question, so I’ll take a shot at it: Western reporting on the Ukraine war has been a propagandised travesty from the beginning, and there is approximately zero chance that Routh is the only crazy self-promoter to have filled our newspapers with arrant nonsense. Apparently all anybody had to do to posture as a prominent supporter of the Ukrainian cause was travel to Kiev and paint a few signs.